Orwellian Me

I have just returned from my second time attending the AWP conference, which (like last year) was wonderfully exhilarating and utterly overwhelming. Here in Pensacola I lead a life rather thoroughly isolated from any literary community or scene, and so the opportunity to see and talk to so many fellow writers was and is particularly exciting to me. I am pretty poor and the trip has practically bankrupted me, but it was worth it.
I am, as I have written, done with discussing Charles Bernstein's piece, my critique of which was only a part of a post that engaged considerably larger topics, which were simply ignored by most commenters. But the discussion around my post has brought up some issues I do think worth pursuing, both about the tenor of discourse in the online poetry world and about the question of insiders and outsiders in the poetry world(s).
More follows below the fold.

A commenter on my previous post called my arguments "Orwellian." I take that as a compliment, since strictly speaking the adjective "Orwellian" means "of, pertaining to, or resembling George Orwell." (I am well aware that's not how this person meant it, so no one need write to say so.) I have the greatest respect for George Orwell as a writer who pointed out and diagnosed the abuse and misuse of language, which was one of the topics of my post, though hardly the only one. Orwell was also adept at puncturing posture and pretension, especially pretensions to virtue.
Too many people in the online poetry world take any principled disagreement or reasoned argument as a mode of personal attack. In turn, they know how to argue or to disagree only by means of personal attack. It’s also remarkable that when this is pointed out, as I have done here and on my own blog, many people, lacking all manners, respond in exactly the same manner I have decried, as if by blind reflex or reflexive blindness.
I would again like to make the point that the boundaries of the “inside” and the “outside” of the poetry world, or rather the multiple contemporary American poetry worlds, are very porous and unpredictable, and are constantly being redrawn. For example, whatever some people may think of AWP and the AWP conference as instances or symbols of “official verse culture” or some such shibboleth, almost everyone I met and/or spent time with at both conferences I’ve attended could be considered some variety of a “post-avant” writer. (Kent Johnson made a similar point in his comment on my previous post.)
At this point, I will reiterate some of the things I wrote in the comments section of my previous point, in the hope that what doesn’t seem to have been heard the first time might be heard this time.
Many of those who were once on the outside are now quite thoroughly insiders, and many people now cultivate a sense of outsiderhood who have never been anywhere but in the middle of the in crowd. Paul Hoover asks in a very interesting post on his blog regarding the question of whether the post-avant, "postmodern American poetry" as represented in part by his estimable Norton anthology (the book's publisher tells volumes about the shifting sands of "mainstream" and "alternative" literatures, as does Norton’s forthcoming publication of the anthology American Hybrid, edited by David St. John and Cole Swensen, two poets on supposedly opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum), is the new mainstream, "Would it matter if Christian Bök and Kasey Mohammad had tenure-track positions?" Unless I am misreading their bios, both have not just tenure-track but tenured academic positions, as do many Language poets (Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman, for example, are both at the University of Pennsylvania, near the pinnacle of the academic hierarchy) and their very diverse aesthetic progeny. And yes, that does matter. But many people willfully refuse to recognize that the landscape has changed, and that a lot of things that used to be weeds are now treasured flowers.
Many very comfortably ensconced people, older and younger, enjoy complaining about how marginalized and excluded they are. But as the marvelous poet Michael Anania once said to me, if you continue to nurse a sense of grievance and victimization after you’ve become successful, then you just become an asshole.
At the risk of sounding like Rodney King asking “Can’t we all just get along?”, I would like to point out that the enemy, if an enemy is required (as it seems to be), is not other poets, however different their aesthetic and social dispositions, and not even an organization like AWP (which is indeed a legal corporation), but a culture and an economy of scarcity—of money, of resources, of attention, of recognition professional and personal—that pits people in the society as a whole and in any given social endeavor against one another in a zero sum competition for crumbs of a shrinking economic and social pie precisely in order to prevent them from cooperating in changing the reward/withholding/punishment system some profit from, some rail against (some of these are actually suffering and some just don't want to admit that they're profiting), and most are actively harmed by.
Those engaged in the virtual turf wars with which the online poetry world is rife might do well to recognize that their battles and mock-battles in tempestuous teapots are the direct result, indeed can accurately be described as symptoms, of the economy of scarcity. The energy expended in those gladiatorial contests might be more productively used elsewhere and to other ends, ends that might obviate the need for such catfights. (Forgive my mixed metaphors.)